Nick Rahaim | Vox

I walked out of rehab and into a pandemic

2020-04-21T17:31:44-04:00

After more than 15 years of chasing oblivion in a bottle, I knew it had to end. So I checked myself into rehab on February 21. The plan was to dry out for 30 days, get out of rehab, find an Alcoholics Anonymous group, connect with a sponsor, and hopefully end the vicious cycle of drinking, regret, depression, and more drinking.

But come March 22, when my 30 days were up, I found the world to be vastly different from what it had been when I had entered rehab — empty streets, bare shelves at the grocery store, and people more afraid of others than usual. All I had learned of the terms “shelter in place” and “social distancing” while in a rehab center in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains was from the local daily newspaper and short calls from a payphone to my loved ones on the outside. But I had no idea what I was in for.

Once discharged, I realized how the beginning of my sobriety would go: no hugs from friends and family, no AA meetings in church basements, no dinners at my favorite restaurants. These things I had clung onto as bright spots as I faced my life after rehab were now gone. Then there were the classic triggers that cause people to relapse — isolation and economic insecurity, which have been now amplified to levels most of us have not seen in our lifetimes.

“This is the worst possible time to get into recovery, there is not a doubt about it,” Dr. Paul Earley, president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, told me over the phone.

There are around 20 million people with substance addiction disorders in the US, according to federal data. Combined with the 14,500 addiction treatment centers in the country limiting and changing operations due to the coronavirus pandemic, there are likely thousands newly cut off from the support they seek.

The pandemic has created unique challenges for many groups of people, and painfully exacerbated existing disparities. But for those of us fighting addiction, it’s especially scary. The collapse of the normal support structures has made building new patterns, habits, and community exceedingly difficult.

“I was trying to think of how this could be worse, maybe a war situation,” Earley said. “But the isolation and loneliness people are facing now is about as bad as it could get.”

Fresh out of rehab, I was ignorantly confident in myself. But after three weeks of isolation, I found myself parked outside a liquor store for 30 minutes, debating whether or not I should enter. I eventually did.

Looking toward sobriety

I’m 36 years old, and after years of being a full-time journalist, I’m now a grad student who spends summers working in Bristol Bay, Alaska, to earn money for tuition by fishing salmon. I still pay my monthly bills through freelance journalism and contract writing gigs, and I’ve always been a productive drunk, but boozing every night has made two jobs and grad school all very difficult to sustain. Hangovers bled the night into the day and have often made unaware bosses and editors perplexed with the inconsistent quality of my work and my failure to meet deadlines. My romantic relationships fell apart over and over again.

After years of failing to meet my professional expectations, a string of failed relationships, and a history of substance misuse on both sides of my family, I started cognitive behavioral therapy with a psychologist to begin to address my problems. One thing became painfully clear earlier this year: I couldn’t make the positive changes I needed while continuing my relationship with alcohol. So, I put my life on hold and sought help finding the tools I needed to fully address my drinking and shortcomings.

Recovery is difficult and all too often bound toward failure. As someone new to sobriety, I’m in no position to talk with any authority on how to be successful. But as someone working toward a new way of living, I know how hard it is to stay away from addictions in the midst of the public health crisis we now face.

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were a big part of my plan to be a part of a larger community during this newly sober stage of my life. Like most of life these days, AA and other 12-step meetings — of which there are an estimated 66,345 groups and 1,361,838 members across the nation — connect on Zoom. Local AA groups, including those in my hometown of Monterey, California, have adapted to quickly move normally scheduled meetings online. Facebook groups and webpages have popped up to allow people to join meetings happening across the globe at any time.

I tune in a few times a week on my laptop from my studio apartment. Most who attend the online meetings seem elated to see the familiar faces of their allies in recovery. While they are all welcoming to a newcomer like myself, and I have felt comfortable sharing that I am fresh out of rehab, it’s still hard for me to connect with them on a personal level as a new face on a computer screen.

There is something missing from the in-person meetings, where I’m told that connections that bleed into after-meeting conversations build the early bonds of establishing a support network. And this is not only an excuse for why my attendance is well short of the recommended 90 meetings in 90 days for people new to sobriety, and why I’m not even close to finding a sponsor to help guide me through the 12-step and early sobriety.

“This is the worst possible time to get into recovery, there is not a doubt about it”

Earley, who himself has 36 years of sobriety, agrees that making first connections with one’s potential support community remotely is a difficult endeavor. Video conferencing tools are best suited for people who have an established rapport with each other, he said.

“Access to therapy and support networks is the glaring problem right now,” Earley said. “Everyone needs human closeness, especially for those in early recovery, and that is lacking in a video conference. It’s inherently more difficult for people to connect and feel safe.”

Nikki Soda, the membership development officer for the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, sees similar challenges in getting people plugged into support networks after rehab.

“You don’t get all the tools needed for recovery by interacting through a computer, you build a foundation through the conversations before and after meetings — those parking lot conversations when you speak with someone one-on-one,” Soda said.

While Covid-19 is a more immediate public health concern than addiction, alcohol misuse alone affects 15 million people in the US and leads to 88,000 annual deaths, according to federal data. And that’s not even counting the other public health crisis that hasn’t gone away during the pandemic: the 2 million Americans with opioid addiction, leading to nearly 47,000 overdose deaths in 2018, according to the most recent federal data. Relapse, especially for people who use opioids, can easily lead to death, but those with addiction are more at risk for contracting and dying from Covid-19 because they are also more likely to be homeless, incarcerated, or have other physical ailments, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Earley and Soda have both seen the majority of intensive outpatient facilities move to virtual treatment. Access to services has tightened even as treatment providers try to do their best in a difficult situation. People have to unlearn habits and change attachments, they said. Yet sheltering in place often isolates those with addiction in triggering environments.

The struggle is not over

In the parking lot at the liquor store, I gave into my urges, walked in, and bought a six-pack of beer and a pint of Seagram 7 whiskey — the brand my dad drinks daily. It wasn’t planned. The walls of the small apartment I live in by myself felt like they were closing in on me. While I had a few social distance outings with friends, not being able to see anyone regularly was making me start to crack.

This isn’t the way the initial draft of this article ended, but I’ve stayed sober in the days since. Building routines has always been difficult for me, but doing so while trying to stay sober feels like improv jazz — sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant. I tune into AA meetings over Zoom, I talk to my therapist by teleconference, and I’ve tried to establish a daily mindful meditation practice as a way to fight against my self-destructive impulses.

But my situation is still precarious. People with addiction are already more likely than not to relapse, let alone during a pandemic where we’re forced to physically separate. Some of the people I became closest with in rehab have already fallen into a full relapse. What scares me the most is my rehab friends and acquaintances with opioid addictions — they are reentering society only to find isolation, and the comfort of their next dose could be fatal.

These aren’t easy times for any of us, and for those looking for sobriety in these uncertain times, Earley has some advice: “I want people to have hope that if the struggles seem greater than normal, this is not a normal time, so it’s not the time to be hard on yourself.”

There are many like me who decided to change their lives at a time when the world itself was undergoing rapid change. It’s a struggle, but on the flip side, the timing couldn’t be better — sheltering in place would be a terrible circumstance to be in active addiction. I feel much better going through it sober than drunk, and that alone gives me hope.

Nick Rahaim is a writer based in Monterey, California. Check out his website and find him on Twitter at @nrahaim.

Correction: This essay has been changed to reflect that addiction treatment centers will likely limit and change operations, not necessarily close, due to the pandemic.

Thank God I don’t work at Whole Foods anymore

2017-06-21T17:44:37-04:00

A customer at a Whole Foods Market in Florida in May, 2017. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Thank God I don’t work at Whole Foods anymore.

That was my immediate thought when news broke that Amazon was planning to purchase the organic grocery chain for 13.7 billion dollars. If I still worked the fish counter at Whole Foods, I’d have to work harder and more efficiently — while eating fewer samples — to justify my job over Amazon’s robots.

In 2012, I had a three-month stint as a fishmonger at a Whole Foods Market in San Francisco. I worked at the store in the SoMa neighborhood. My job included organizing the seafood case and cleaning fish to customer preferences. I earned $13 an hour for my services.

But at Whole Foods, being broke didn’t mean we had to go hungry. There were perks — a relaxed atmosphere, 25-cent leftovers at the end of the day, and access to samples from the meat, seafood, and other departments. Amazon knows robots don’t need this kind of margin-eating sustenance.

Whole Foods wasn’t the best job I ever had. But it was a job. Under Amazon, it’s not clear how much human labor will make the cut.

When it comes to their workers, Whole Foods wasn’t as progressive as you might think

Before I worked at Whole Foods, my main gig was working on commercial fishing boats in Alaska to pay off student loans. I was back home in Bay Area and needed work for three months until I could hop onto another boat in the summer. A friend who worked at the store said he could get me a job in the seafood department and I jumped at the opportunity to see the fishing business from the other end of the supply chain.

The job was decent at first — free snacks and a friendly atmosphere certainly helped. I was living rent free with a friend for a few months, making the low pay less brutal. But it wasn’t until I went out for drinks with my co-workers that I began to realize the extent to which workers could not live on their wages. Over beers at a bar down the street, many of them told me they were on public assistance of some kind. There was even a public housing project a few blocks from the Whole Foods SoMa called the “Whole Foods Hotel” by employees because so many workers lived there.

Rents in the Bay Area were beginning their post-Recession climb, and there were rumors that the company was going to stick workers with increased health care costs. A month later, employees’ fears were confirmed and workers were taken off the floor in groups for a meeting about health benefits. There was a quick presentation on how Obamacare was burdening companies like Whole Foods with higher health care premiums.

Given Whole Foods treated its employees with “inclusive values,” employees were allowed to have their say through a non-binding vote on how best to take away benefits. The choices pitted employees with dependents against those without kids. Talk about being a “team.”

Whole Foods doesn’t have employees or managers, only “team members” and “team leaders.” The language is meant to evoke the folksy beginnings of the natural food movement that sprang up at food coops in the 1960s and 1970s. But this was a company publicly traded on Wall Street’s NASDAQ stock exchange. The bottom line seemed to take precedence over employees’ well-being — from what I could tell, progressive rhetoric was meant more to make customers feel good about buying $4 avocados than it was to empower employees.

But it wasn’t all bad. Whole Foods has made the Fortune 100 best places to work the past 17 years. Cultivating a positive work culture was one way Whole Foods justified its anti-union posture. The company also took a hit by choosing people over machines and by being a slow adopter of self-checkouts or other labor-saving technologies present in many other grocery stores.

Meanwhile, Amazon has never been known as a positive place to work, with long hours and untenable goals whether working in a warehouse or crafting code. Whole Foods has long postured the company was “beyond unions,” while Amazon seems to be striving to be beyond employees.

I only stayed at Whole Foods for a few months before boarding the next boat for a new fishing gig. Now, I’m on the cops and crime beat for The Press Democrat in the San Francisco Bay area. I still go to Whole Food’s from time to time–mostly to sample cheese.

Amazon’s attitude toward workers is to completely get rid of them

AmazonGo, set to open in Seattle sometime this year, is a sign of where Amazon would like to see in-store retail evolve: Walk in, pick up what you want, walk out — the product will automatically be charged to your Amazon account. No lines, no human interactions. Once the Amazon drone program passes the FAA, the product will be brought to the customer without even seeing another customer.

An Amazon spokesperson told me the company has no plans to use AmazonGo technology to automate cashiers at Whole Foods stores. He also said that “no job reductions are planned” as a result of the deal to buy Whole Foods.

Still, if I worked there now, I’d be scared.

This is Amazon’s goal: bringing products and services directly to consumers in the most convenient way possible. The more convenient, the more people will buy. Whole Foods, on the other hand, has worked on the old model of customer experience.

Walk into a Whole Foods Market, like the SoMa store I worked in, and there’s fresh, artisanal food presented by employees who are allowed to show off their eccentricities: tattoos, piercings, or whatever style they prefer. The customer experience went beyond the physical store setting: Shoppers were buying into the idea of healthful, organic living with a strong environmental consciousness and a consideration of where their food came from.

For decades, Whole Foods could charge a premium to give shoppers this self-satisfaction. But in recent years, with low-cost competitors and a continued squeeze on people’s wallets, their model faltered and shareholders were out for blood. The stock had dropped by nearly 60 percent since a 2015 high, even after the company shed 1,500 jobs in that year.

Whole Foods has never been great to its workers, but working the floor of any service job will leave one running behind on their bills. Now with Amazon entering the brick-and-mortar retail fray, their new competition is rightly feeling the shockwaves.

Customer service might no longer include wage-earning people to serve customers. This would mean the rolls of people like my co-workers needing housing like the Whole Foods Hotel in SoMa could increase if the Amazon model pushes low-wage work to no work model. These were co-workers of mine who had families to support who barely hustled up a livelihood serving organic food to affluent customers.

If Amazon flips the script on grocery and foodservice sectors, the low-wage workers at the bottom will take the hardest hit. Instead of “Fighting for Fifteen,” former workers will need to start fighting for universal basic income, a guaranteed pay when technology destroys more jobs than it creates.

But for now, my former co-workers will continue helping customers with smiles and snacking where they can, keeping the human touch in the food business as long as possible.

Nick Rahaim is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Check out his blog at www.outside-in.org. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @nrahaim.

Update: Updated after original publication to include comments from Amazon spokesperson Ty Rogers.

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